editor, Author at Mediastreet

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How to Build an Effective B2B Content Marketing Strategy

September 16, 2021 No Comments

B2B brands have the opportunity to leverage content marketing as a way of reaching their target audience and gaining new customers. But it’s not as simple as writing a few blog posts, posting them on your website and hoping for the best. A content marketing strategy is essential to generating those leads that turn into loyal consumers, educating your audience, building brand awareness and building credibility.

So do you have a content marketing strategy? If not, don’t worry—you’re not alone. According to the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, only 41% of survey respondents currently have a documented content marketing strategy in place.

If you’re interested in building an effective B2B content marketing strategy but you’re not quite sure where to get started, we can help. Below, we’ve created a guide to help you get started with your strategy as a B2B marketer and curate content that helps with lead generation, creating a loyal audience and building revenue.

B2B Content Marketing: What Makes It Unique?

Before you can get started with content marketing, it’s important to understand how it comes into play from a B2B perspective. B2B marketing derives from a strategy or content that is made specifically for a business. Typically, this refers to an organization that sells some type of product or service. In comparison, B2C marketing works for companies that are targeting individual consumers who are making purchases for themselves.

Goals for B2B marketing vs B2C marketing differ greatly, as HubSpot explained in this example:

In B2B marketing, customers want ROI and expertise. When it comes to B2C content, customers want deals and entertainment. That means the latter needs to be more fun, and the former needs to be more educational and logical.

If you’re a B2B company and you’re putting all of your focus on advertising, now’s a good time to consider adding creative content to your collateral. According to Demand Metric, 70% of people would prefer to learn about a company through content like a blog post or article in comparison to a typical advertisement.

Creating Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy: 10 Steps to Success

So maybe you’re on board with the idea of content marketing, but you’re not sure where to get started. Don’t fret—we’ve created a step-by-step guide to creating a B2B content marketing strategy and executing it properly:

1. Define Your Overall Goals

Your content marketing strategy should be built with purpose. Setting goals in the early stages can help you bring your business to life. We recommend following the SMART process when coming up with your goals:

Specific. Don’t be broad, hone in on exactly what it is you want to achieve.
Measurable. What does your business’ success mean to you, and how will this motivate you to move forward?
Achievable. Are there going to be blockades keeping you from achieving your goals, or are they truly attainable?
Relevant. Your goals should not only be realistic, but make sense regarding your business strategy.
Time-bound. How long is it going to take to achieve your goals, and does this timeline work for you?

Using these criteria as the blueprint to your content marketing strategy can make it easier to envision the bigger picture during the beginning stages of the process.

2. Understand Your Audience and Create Buyer Personas

Who are you creating content for? How are you going to resonate with your target audience? What does your potential buyer want to get out of visiting your website?

Getting to know the individuals who are paying close attention to you, your products and services all starts with creating a buyer persona. Essentially, a buyer persona is a fictional character created to represent a person who would be interested in your product.

This fictional representation is curated by market research and data collected about your customers in an effort to create as real of a person in this scenario as you possibly can. Individual buyer personas should include demographic information, job role, as well as specific goals and challenges this decision-maker faces. Creating buyer personas will give you a better idea of how to create your message and who you need to tailor it to.

3. Create a Brand Voice

Does your brand have a certain style that sets you apart from your competitors? Creating a distinct voice and tone will give you the leverage to stand out in your industry. Decide what your brand’s personality will be in written format, whether it’s educational and serious or humorous and relatable. Tone is something that offers more flexibility, as it can be used in content based on specific buyer personas. Think about it this way: Your tone isn’t going to be the same in a short blurb as it would be in a white paper.

4. Map Out the Customer Journey

Now that you’ve established a strong foundation for your brand in general, it’s time to think about how you’ll leverage your company to bring in customers through the sales funnel. This takes place after putting forth lead generation efforts; it’s where your potential customers start at the top and come out as loyal clients. Also known as a marketing funnel, this is where your customers start their journey with you and are welcomed to explore what your business has to offer. As they get to the middle, you nurture them and guide them toward the bottom where they can start the beginning stages of a sale.

The sales funnel isn’t a one-size-fits-all template. In fact, we put together a list of different examples to consider for your own business. Take a look and decide which makes the most sense for your content marketing strategy.

5. Understand What Your Competitors are Doing

While most of your focus should be on bringing customers in, you still need to pay attention to your competitors. With a strong understanding of what they’re doing, you can be better prepared to face them in your industry and learn how to provide potential customers with a better product or service. A simple way to do this is by benchmarking, which the American Productivity & Quality Centre defines as a way to measure your own key business metrics and practices and compare them to your competitors. This gives you an inside look at what’s working for them and what isn’t, which can give you the upper hand to better define the industry standard.

6. Brainstorm with Your Content Team

With the backend research in the palm of your hand, it’s time to get together with your team of content creators and assess the content types you want to move forward with. Brainstorming sessions can come in handy when it comes to collaboration among a content team, and this can involve keyword research, topic generation and choosing content format options.

7. Create a Content Strategy Blueprint

After brainstorming with the team of creators, it’s time to move forward with your specific content types. It’s important to be flexible throughout your strategy, however—down the line, you may find that a content audit and ROI shows one content format is producing better results for you than another, which can ultimately guide the future of your process. Having a flexible blueprint will keep you organized and prepared to navigate a different route if necessary.

Content types to consider include:

Blogs
Whitepapers
eBooks
Case studies
Infographics
Newsletters
Press releases
Webinars

Remember: Your content marketing plan can change over time; limiting yourself to only a few different content formats could hold you back from reaching your goals. Consider having these content types in rotation in a content calendar over a certain period of time if you want to explore the different opportunities of each option.

8. Execute Your Strategy and Start Creating Content

Now that your complete strategy is in writing, it’s time to bring your content marketing efforts to fruition. By now, you’re ready to take those content ideas and bring them to life. While content creation itself can be a strenuous task, it can also be considered the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of your content marketing strategy.

It’s where all of your hard work is put to the test: Did you properly educate your team on buyer personas? Was your keyword research and topic selection on point? All of these questions will be answered in the coming months after putting your content out there, but first, you need to put the pen to paper (or, fingertips to keyboard) and get to work!

9. Promote Your Content

Once your content is squeaky clean, keyword-targeted and ready for your target audience, it’s time to publish and promote. This can involve sending out an email blast, posting to social media, or creating targeted ads to get more eyes on your content. How you choose to promote your content should align with your specific goals of the strategy, but the more eyes on your work, the better!

10. Measure the ROI

Now, it’s time to see if your quality content performed as well as planned. The final stage of your content marketing strategy should involve a content performance check, or a content audit to measure the ROI and effectiveness of your content creation process.

In content marketing, ROI shows how much revenue was gained after executing your digital marketing plan in comparison to the amount of money that was spent during the strategy and creation phases. Measuring ROI over a lengthy period of time can be difficult, but it can be simplified by measuring metrics every couple of months to determine if you created engaging content that’s reaching your target audience. We recommend tracking metrics such as:

Website traffic.
CTA click-through rates.
Keyword rankings.
Conversion rates.
Shares on social media platforms.

How to Tell if Your Content Marketing Strategy is Working

Measuring your ROI comes in many different forms, as we detail above. But one of the most important aspects many tend to overlook is maintaining your content strategy over time, or choosing to take a different approach based on the outlook of your current plan in place. A content marketing strategy doesn’t have to be static—with so many different moving parts, there’s always an opportunity to play around with different plans until you find something that works for your business.

You might even reach a point where you don’t think you’re capable of creating a strategy that enables you to reach your goals. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Remember: Outsourcing content marketing is always an option as well. Content Marketing Institute’s research found that 50% of its survey respondents outsource at least some of their content marketing to an agency.

If you’re considering this route, make sure to find a content marketing company that will go above and beyond to get to know your brand. Get an understanding of what they have to offer, ask for samples of writing, video and animation and speak with the content creators themselves if possible. Oh, and don’t forget to browse their website for case studies, testimonials and success stories to seal the deal (hint hint, click the link!)

No matter how you approach your B2B content strategy, just remember to be open minded, take industry trends into consideration and be willing to play around with your process. Starting your strategy is only the beginning—over time, you’ll have the opportunity to experiment, improve your research methods and transform with the world of content marketing.

By Chelsey Church

Chelsey Church is a senior writer and editor at Brafton. When she’s not turning her thoughts into copy, she’s enjoying a craft beer, playing with her dogs or listening to her favourite metal tunes. A Cleveland native, she’ll never let you forget that the Golden State Warriors blew a 3-1 lead.

Sourced from Brafton.com

In News

How To Make Passive Income Blogging

September 16, 2021 No Comments

By C. James

One of the best goals to set for yourself, if you intend to start an online business, is to have income streams that generate that income passively for you.

Passive income means that you are not constantly having to work hard to generate revenue, but instead you work smart and productively. There are many ways to earn passive income, some are completely passive while others (like owning an online business) become more passive over time.

One of the simplest, but most effective elements you should consider creating as part of your online business is a blog.

Although it is not essential, you will find those businesses which have a blog will generate increased revenues, have more loyal followers and customers, and the blog allows them to create additional passive income.

Where To Begin

Before you start your blog, and indeed your online business, you should determine which niche or niches you want them to target. You can take several approaches to this, with the first being to have them in a niche that you know very well and are reasonably passionate about, such as a hobby you follow. This can work and will certainly be easier in the beginning as you will have an idea of what subjects to blog about.

The danger is that no matter how passionate you are about the niche, if it is not one which lends itself to an online business, you are going to struggle to generate any income. For example, you might know all there is to know about competitive duck herding (Yes, that is a genuine hobby) but in all reality, there is hardly going to be an audience to which you could blog, let alone promote products to and generate an income.

Instead, you want to choose a niche that is proven to have a large and captive audience, and more importantly, a niche which is proven to buy products online. .

Creating Your Blog

By far the most popular platform that bloggers use on their website is WordPress. This is a content management system that you install on your website, and which makes it extremely easy to create, post, and edit your blog content.

Most importantly, using WordPress on your website gives you multiple options with which you can promote your content, encourage others to share it and most importantly build up the loyal following you need to consume your content on regular basis. After choosing a CMS, you will want to find a hosting platform for your blog. Make sure you pick one with great reviews like HostGator or a handful of others.

Once you have your blog set up, do not go in all guns blazing trying to promote offers, or sell something. That is the quickest way to kill your blog before it even gets started. Instead, introduce yourself, say a little a bit about why you are interested in the niche you have chosen, and finish it by asking those who read your posts to leave their comments.

Continue posting every day to start with, as this will help your blog get noticed quicker by the search engines, especially Google. As you proceed, the hope will be that as you add more content it starts to get shared, and when other websites start linking to it, your search engine ranking will continue to improve. As a result, you’ll start getting ever-increasing numbers of visitors to your blog.

Content Automation

Bear in mind that you do not want to just post written content, so video and audio posts should also be used. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of having to create a lot of content is the amount of time it can take. If you want to earn passive income, that cause is hardly helped if you have to spend hours each week creating it.

Regardless of which format your posts take, you should be looking at ways with which you can automate your blog. One of the simplest ways to do this is to employ someone to create and post the content for you. By outsourcing this part of your business, you will free up a lot of time. The cost of doing this can be comparatively low, especially when compared to what you consider an hour of your time to be worth.

There are websites, like Fiverr, where you can employ freelance writers, voice artists, and video makers, who can produce exceptional high-quality content for you, for hourly rates, or one-off fees, that often have to be seen to be believed. With your freelancers doing all this work, you can focus on those parts of your business that generate the income.

Passive Income Streams From Blogging

With your blog well established within your niche and attracting lots of visitors, you should now have the opportunity to use it to support and complement your income-generating activities. You should also have created social media groups and pages, created an email list by placing an opt-in box on your blog, and occasionally post promotional blog posts which review products you are happy to endorse.

These promotional posts will form parts of your affiliate marketing strategy, whereby you earn a commission each time something you recommend is purchased via a link you have in your blog post. You can also promote affiliate products via your social media accounts too. For example, you can make a Facebook post recommending a product or service and do likewise on Twitter.

‘For Sale – One Blog, One Previous, Wealthy Owner’

The ultimate way in which your blog can earn you a passive income of a sort, is to sell it. Depending on the revenue that you generate from all your affiliate promotions, and any of your own products which you use it to promote, there are buyers who will pay a very high multiple of that figure.

It is not unknown for websites with a proven monthly income of just a few thousand dollars to be bought for a six-figure sum. While that would mean that your blog is no longer yours and therefore not earning you a passive income anymore, undoubtedly the $100k+ that you may have pocketed will be more than enough to encourage you to start again … and not forgetting you still have the passive income from your Twitter accounts.

By C. James

Sourced from WEALTHGANG

In News

10 Tips for Finding Your Why and Staying Motivated in Your Business

September 16, 2021 No Comments

By Annie Pilon

If you want to run a successful business, you need the right motivation. Remembering your reason for starting a business may help. Some go into business for enjoyment, others for financial freedom. There is no wrong answer. But members of the online small business community can help you make the most of yours with these tips.

Reconnect with Your Why

Every entrepreneur has a reason for going into business. But everyone’s is a bit different. Reconnecting to this purpose may help you stay motivated through the difficult stretches. This Future of Business and Tech post features an interview with Melinda Emerson on this subject.

Make Ends Meet While Living on a Tight Budget

Supporting your family is one of the best motivators for running a business. But the early years may still be lean. To support both your business and your life, follow the tips in this Work At Home Woman post by Courtney Stich.

Find Your Non-Negotiables

Lots of business owners put up with less than ideal interactions from clients and/or team members. But firm boundaries are important as well. In this Strella Social Media post, Rachel Strella discusses how to outline and communicate your non-negotiables.

Create a Successful Knowledge-Sharing Culture

Running a small business provides plenty of learning opportunities. If you have a team, there may be even more chances for you all to learn from one another. But you need to facilitate a culture that supports this. Learn more in this Small Biz Daily post by Chris Buttenham.

Follow These Digital Marketing Tips to Grow Your New Business

When you’re just starting out, all the different marketing options may seem overwhelming. But keeping your end goals in mind can help. Bernard M. Miller explores some digital marketing options in this Moss Media post. And the BizSugar community discussed the ideas here.

Chart Your Customer Journey

Serving customers is an excellent motivation for running a business. But to do this successfully, you need to understand their behaviour. Charting the customer journey may help. Dorian Travers shares one way to do so in this GrowMap post.

Foster a Positive Work Environment

Lots of entrepreneurs start their own ventures so they can actually enjoy the work they do. As you hire, fostering a positive work environment can help both you and your team with this goal. Read about how to do this in this Noobpreneur post by Ivan Widjaya.

Choose Between Blogging and Content Marketing

Blogging and content marketing both allow you to share your passions with readers and customers. But there are differences between these two concepts. Understanding each one can help you pick what’s best for your specific goals. Mike Allton of Blogging Brute elaborates here.

Learn About Content Curation

If you do utilize content marketing for your business, get familiar with curation. This strategy becomes much easier when you have a specific vision in mind for your brand. Claudia Bird shares more in this Blogging Wizard post. And BizSugar members elaborated here.

Create a Brand Strategy for Your Goals

Once you understand the motivation and purpose of your business, you need to create a brand to match. This Crowdspring post by Ross Kimbarovsky features a simple guide to help business owners create a brand strategy.

If you’d like to suggest your favourite small business content to be considered for an upcoming community roundup, please send your news tips to: [email protected].

Feature Image Credit: Depositphotos

By Annie Pilon

Sourced from Small Business Trends

In News

Why Your Website NEEDS a Blog to Increase Organic Traffic

September 15, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from 24MATINS.UK

Sometimes, it can feel like online marketing is like throwing money into a bottomless pit. Social media ads, while useful, can get expensive and your budget may not support much experimentation. Creating an SEO friendly blog is a free solution to new customers.

Online marketing can get expensive, especially if you are a small business with not a lot of room in your budget. For many business owners that are just starting out, it is not realistic to spend hundreds of dollars every week on new ads that may or may not convert. Savvy business owners can save money by starting a blog on their website to gain traffic organically.

Your website is already a big advertisement for your product, and you just need potential customers to get there to sell it. Creating a SEO-friendly blog on your website is a way to get more customers to come flocking to you without spending a dime.

One business that does this very well is Grammarly. Grammarly is a company that sells software that helps improve your grammar and readability of documents. If you Google different common grammatical questions, Grammarly is typically among the first results.

The post should answer the question you searched, and then subtly advertise your product within the answer to the question. One example is if you search for “is year old hyphenated”, one of the first results is this article: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/year-old-hyphen/. The article answers the question in great detail, but it also weaves in many ads for their product seamlessly. Readers will be satisfied with the content of the article as it answers their question, and they will also be informed of the product that Grammarly is selling.

Blog posts should cover topics that you think your customers would be interested in, and they should have valuable content as this will be your potential customer’s first impression of your company. If your business sells coffee, you would not create blog posts about how to effectively mow your lawn, but you might create a post detailing how to properly clean your coffee machine.

The hardest part about starting a blog is just that; starting. Once you start publishing your blog posts on your website, they will stay there as long as you keep them there, consistently bringing you traffic.

Creating a blog is not going to miraculously give you a huge increase in sales, nor is it a replacement to more traditional marketing methods, but it is a great addition to your marketing strategy and the benefits will slowly increase over time. The best thing you can do to increase your exposure to more potential customers without breaking the bank is to start a blog, and to start it NOW. The longer you wait, the longer it’ll take for results to happen.

Feature Image Credit: Image par Photo Mix de Pixabay

Sourced from 24MATINS.UK

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How to Write an SEO-Friendly Blog Article

September 15, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from Blog Maggrand

Writing a blog article that satisfies both human readers and search engines will get you to the top of SERPs. After reading this article, you will know how to write an SEO-friendly blog article. In other words, you will learn how to optimize your blog article for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

No need for a long introduction; let’s dive in.

1. Keyword and Post Title

You don’t just start writing an article without targeting or having any specific keyword in mind. A keyword is the search query a user will type in Google Search box to find your article. So, your blog post title and its content must match the user’s search query.

My keyword for this article you are reading is “SEO-Friendly Blog Article.” Any search engine user that types those words in the search box will indeed find me. The post title doesn’t need to be too long or too short. If it is too long, parts of it will not show in search results. And if it is too short, it might make the user not want to click through to your page.

The title of your blog post needs to have the appropriate width, and it must include your keyword. Take the title of this article your are reading for example.

How to Write an SEO-Friendly Blog Article

Google has a fixed width limit of 600 pixels for page titles. If your title tag is wider than the set limit, Google will cut parts of it, and I know you don’t want that. So, you can take advantage of Moz Title Tag Preview Tool whenever you want to craft an article. As you can see on the image above, all you need to do is write a title in the box and click the Check button.

So, in the long run, a good title:

Has a direct influence on your ranking.
Can give you a high CTR (click-through rate).

2. Content body optimization

Now that you know how to optimize your title tag and its keyword for SEO, it is time you give details of what you know. It all begins with a brief and straightforward introduction. You need to provide quick info about your keyword. Tell the readers what they should expect to gain or learn after reading the full article. If it is not something they are looking for, they can quickly bounce away after reading the introduction.

But they won’t because you have insights about the information they are searching for in your post.

Your introduction is the first paragraph of your content. Your keyword must appear in the introduction. Scroll to the top of this page and double-check my introduction. It contains my keyword as well as what the reader should expect to learn along the way.

While writing the body of your article, here are some crucial factors you need to put into consideration:

Images ALT tag.
Text readability.
Text length.
Internal links.
Outbound links.

3. Image ALT tag optimization

Alt text (alternative text) briefly describes an image to search engine crawlers for proper image indexing. Without an Alt text, search engine bots do not understand what images in your post are all about. Therefore can not correctly index and rank them in image search results.

Someone suggests that you write your alt tags as if you are describing them to a blind person. Search engine bots are blind; therefore, they can’t read or see what or who is on the image. So, you have to help them with a brief description. That’s where alt text comes in handy.

At least let one of your image alt tags include your focus keyword. Yes, just one of them to avoid spammy attempts at keyword stuffing.

The one benefit of optimizing your image for SEO through alt text is traffic from image search result pages. You would notice that whenever you conduct an image search on Google, there is a Visit link button under every image you click on.

Google is telling the user to click on the Visit button for more information about the image. When the user does, you have a visitor from an image search. So, both image and web search can bring traffic to your blog. With that in mind, don’t underestimate the power of alt tags.

4. Text readability

Text readability is another essential SEO factor you need to consider if you want to write an SEO-Friendly blog article. A readable text has to do with the length of your sentences, the use of difficult words in your writing.

In order words, you should limit the use of difficult words and shorten your sentences. By breaking down long sentences, your text will be much easier to read. Writing too many long sentences makes your text difficult for readers to absorb.

Below is an example of both complex and easy to read text:

You should also try to avoid using difficult words where possible. In case you have to use them, try to explain them to readers who might not understand their meanings. That way, you are writing to a broad audience. Above all, your text should be easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students.

In addition to avoid using complicated words, you also need to:

Write in active voice instead of passive voice.
Avoid repetitive sentences.
Use enough transition words.
Know the basics of subheading distribution.
keep your paragraphs short.

Moreover, you can also use this free online tool to check your text readability score.

5. Text length

Writing a high-quality lengthy post is no easy task. But your article will have a higher chance of ranking high in Search engine result pages if it contains more than a thousand words. However, to write a high-quality lengthy post, you need to have a lot of information at your disposal.

In other words, the information at your disposal will determine the length of your text. Most importantly, you should keep the readability aspects in mind when you are writing a lengthy post.

It would be best if you always aim to write blog posts of around 700-800 words. The minimum word count of a blog post is 300, while the maximum is 2500. Your content needs to be unique. Don’t do copy and paste, if you want to become a successful blogger, be original in your writing.

The longer your article, the more often your keyword will naturally pop up here and there throughout your text. Your focus keyword should not appear more than 3-4 times, depending on the length of your text. In a well optimized SEO-Friendly blog article of 700 words, the focus keyword should appear at least 3 times.

To get blog post ideas, this article could come in handy.

6. Internal and External links

Linking from one page to another within your own blog is called internal linking. Linking from your blog to another page outside your blog is called external linking. Throughout this article, I have linked to articles outside my blog. Why? Because I find them to be helpful and can add value to my audience when combined with what I’m saying here.

In the same vein, anyone who finds my article informative will link to me from his content. So, both Internal and External linking are crucial to your SEO.

Are you a WordPress user? If yes, then you would want to check if you have these four essential plugins for WordPress SEO installed on your blog.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the main point of this article is to give you insight into what an SEO-Friendly blog article is all about. I believe you know how to craft one already, so share the knowledge?

Sourced from Blog Maggrand

In News

7 Digital Marketing Jobs for Beginners

September 15, 2021 No Comments

By Rachel Burnham

A guide to the skills needed, where to earn certificates and starting pay

Looking for a new job is always a challenge. But digital marketing jobs are on the rise and may be worth considering if you’re looking to switch careers in midlife. Here are seven possibilities:

Social Media Manager

If you know a lot about social media platforms and have spent a good deal of time using them, the job of a social media manager could be for you. It requires building a strategy for social media promotions and engaging users to follow social media accounts.

The average annual salary of a beginner marketing manager is about $40,000

The jobs site Glassdoor says the average annual base pay for a social media manager is about $52,400.

To become a social media manager, you must understand social media algorithms and how to leverage them.

Other skills for this job:

Image editing
Understanding of the latest market trends
Video marketing skills
Google Analytics

You might find it useful to take courses or training before applying for this job. The Centro Institute offers a social media advertising certification program.

And Berkeley Institute has one in social media marketing strategies.

Marketing Manager

To become a marketing manager, you’ll need the following skills:

The ability to work in what are known as pay-per-click (PPC) platforms; PPC is an online advertising model where an advertiser pays a publisher every time someone clicks on its ad
Basic skills in HTML (the basic language of web browsers)
The ability to manage email marketing

Knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a plus and so are skills in Content Management Systems (CMS), the software applications to create, edit, collaborate and publish digital content.

The average annual salary of a beginner marketing manager is about $40,000, according to ReliableSoft. When you gain experience, you may be able to earn $70,000 or more.

There are plenty of online marketing programs for beginners at places like LinkedIn Learning, Google Digital Garage and the American Marketing Association.

Content Marketing Specialist

There are several skills and backgrounds you’ll need before applying for a position as a content marketing strategist:

A certificate in content marketing
Basic research and writing skills
Knowledge of online marketing tools and SEO copywriting

Expect to earn about $35,000 per year as a content marketing specialist newbie, according to the ReliableSoft digital marketing agency.

Here, too, you can earn a certificate to learn the ABCs. The online education programs Coursera and Udemy offer courses to do it.

Digital PR Specialist

If you enjoy speaking with people, resolving minor or major challenges and communicating at a professional level, you might look for a job as a digital public relations specialist.

The job is challenging, but you may perform it well if you are good at the following:

Communication with enterprises on a global level
Conversations and meetings with partners
Managing meetings online for employees

The average salary for beginners in the digital PR field typically ranges from $36,000 to $45,000, according to Glassdoor. Obtaining a digital PR certificate may help you get hired.

Affiliate Marketing Manager

As an affiliate marketing manager, your job will be to promote a company’s affiliate program, which pays bloggers and other people to advertise its products and services as a way of generating sales.

Here, useful skills include:

Knowledge of digital marketing and e-commerce marketing
Strong communication skills
Writing skills

Affiliate marketing managers starting out can earn up to $46,000 per year, according to ReliableSoft. To learn how to do the job, you might enrol in a certificate program through a site like Udemy or Performance Marketing.

Graphics Designer

A graphics designer manages advertising design, infographics, illustrations and web design. Essential skills include:

A degree in graphic design, fine arts or marketing
Writing and editing abilities
Experience using design tools

In addition, knowledge of CMS, HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets — how HTML elements get displayed) is a plus.

Starting salary is often about $38,000.

SEO Specialist

Working as an SEO specialist, your job is to improve the ranking of a website during an online search. Key skills for this job:

Copywriting
Analytics
CMS and HTML knowledge
Digital marketing
Technical SEO skills

While this job requires more technical knowledge than some of the others here, the remuneration can be great. As a beginner, you can expect to earn $51,000.

Online programs like The Complete CEO Course offer certificates for beginners.

Don’t know where to look for one of those jobs? Try websites such as these:

Glassdoor
LinkedIn Jobs
Indeed.com
Upwork
FlexiJobs
AngelList

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Rachel Burnham

Rachel Burnham is chief operating officer at the VeePN VPN company. In her free time, she writes articles aimed at helping people with career growth and self-realization. Her articles can be found at Addicted2Success, Blog.Icons8, ELearningIndustry, GoodFirms, Yoh and MailRelay.

Sourced from nextavenue

In News

7 Reasons You Need to Be Using Landing Pages

September 14, 2021 No Comments

By Carrie Cousins

You’ve come across them everywhere: Landing pages that take you to a website but aren’t the homepage.

It’s a great strategy that helps get visitors directly to the information they want to see from a marketing source – social media, advertising, etc. – and is generally designed for a specific goal.

If using landing pages isn’t already part of your website strategy, it’s time to consider them. Here, we’ll look at seven reasons you need to be using landing pages to help drive the right kind of conversions on your website.

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1. Drive Conversions by Sending Visitors to the Right Place

Landing pages provide a level of specificity that helps people find what they are looking for. A good landing page has one specific thing for visitors to do – fill out a form, buy an item, watch a video, etc.

The key element of this landing page is it helps visitors get to the right place. Almost half of all materials link to a website homepage.

These pages are often shorter than many of the other pages on your website with a main image and text block, actionable elements, and supporting evidence. The page fits in the “shell” of your website, often with the same head and footer as other pages so that it looks consistent for users.

For the best chance at driving conversions, create super-specific messaging here that directly relates to the call to action. Don’t make users look too hard for information.

If the ad or social media post that leads users to the landing page highlights the purple widget your company sells, the landing page should be all about the purple widget, not a collection of everything you do. (That’s what the homepage is for.)

The key element of this landing page is it helps visitors get to the right place. Almost half of all materials link to a website homepage. (Think of how much digging you might have to do to find the exact thing that made you click a link.)

2. Collect Actionable Information

In addition to conversions, a landing page can help you collect usable and actionable data about website visitors. (Just make sure you have an analytics tracking tool assigned to the page.)

This data includes:

Demographic information
Referral sources
Interest in offers
Conversion rates (interest)
Conversion information

You can use all of this information to help generate better future campaigns and make business decisions.

3. Design Pages for Action

Landing pages are designed for action, making them an ideal location for forms of quick sales.

The other key benefit is that if you have some data about your best audience segments or customers, you can design hyper-targeted campaigns that speak to these people specifically. This can greatly increase the overall number of conversions, as the “right people” visit the landing page.

Design the page with imagery, language, and an offer that speaks exactly to that target audience.

If you have multiple and varying audiences for the same product or service, create multiple landing pages with imagery and language or an offer that speaks to each one.

For example, if you own a gym, you may show images of women working out on one landing page and men on another. The ending offer to sign up may be the same.

4. They Feel Personalized

Because of the nature of digital targeting, a well-done landing page can feel personalized in a way that other pages of your website may not. You want users to feel like the page was made just for them.

Once you get users to the page, maintain the personalized feeling through design elements:

Consider different button colours or a colour palette that appeals to the audience
Keep forms short and ask for as little information as possible
Use a voice that speaks to this audience (even if it is a little different than other pages)
Add a video or photos that connect directly with the user segment

Not convinced? HubSpot found that personalized calls to action convert 202% better than a basic CTA.

5. Focused Messaging

Focused messaging on a landing page often breaks down into a simple formula with four elements. This can be vitally important for websites or brands that offer similar products or services for different types of people or varying products and services.

These pages typically contain:

A value proposition (with an image/video and text)
A direct call to action (it’s often repeated on the page)
Benefits to support the value proposition
Social proof such as testimonials, reviews, or a “ticker” that shows sales, subscriptions, etc.

6. Understand What Visitors Want

Landing pages can be an invaluable source of business intelligence.

Collect new leads
Track recurring conversions and visitors
Identify a more focused audience segment
Better understand user behaviours and actions
Create a more focused and targeted user persona of key converters

7. Provide a Place for Marketing Offers to “Live”

These pages, quite simply, are collection tools to help you connect with key audiences in just the right way.

Landing pages are a way to help keep marketing efforts organized. Use them as a place for marketing offers to live.

As you build a collection of pages, you can use them over time with different campaigns to drive traffic for the business. (You can revise that holiday page each year and use the same landing page to drive traffic over time.)

These pages, quite simply, are collection tools to help you connect with key audiences in just the right way. Since the pages aren’t part of the main navigation, they are direct paths from other marketing activities to connect with your user base.

Conclusion

Landing pages work because they help website visitors find exactly what they came for.

If your homepage is the gateway to information or the products and services you sell, a landing page is a direct path to a specific thing or action. With attention spans getting shorter every day, landing pages are a way to capture people before they get bored.

There’s no specific number of landing pages a website needs to be successful. Just remember to keep each page focused and aligned to the content that gets users to it. This correlation will help generate more leads and get the right people interested in your website.

By Carrie Cousins

Sourced from design shack

In News

From Insta captions to blog posts, AI is now crunching copy for brands

September 14, 2021 No Comments

By Ryan Barwick

Chris Lu, cofounder and chief technology officer of Copy.ai, told us these tools give copywriters a “first draft” to work with.

“Marketing Brew is the home of provocative ideas, fresh thinking, provocative insights, and interesting perspectives on what they think about marketing, media and advertising. This publication gives you a way to digest their news, quick takes and new offerings in the field.”

This description of our newsletter was written by artificial intelligence. Pretty close, right?

Given only our name and a brief description—“a newsletter about marketing, media and advertising”—a tool called Copy.ai was able to spit out that paragraph.

The tool is part of a wave of smart content-churning machines that use the power of artificial intelligence to ~~steal writing jobs~~ make life easier for whomever’s crunching copy.

HAL meets Stan Freberg

Copy.ai and other AI-enabled copywriting companies like Jarvis and Copysmith are built upon OpenAI’s GPT-3.

According to the smart folks over at Emerging Tech Brew, GPT-3 is kind of a big deal. Trained on roughly a trillion words to predict—but not understand—text, it’s widely considered to be among the most advanced language models in existence.

“Large language models are powerful machine learning algorithms with one key job description: identifying large-scale patterns in text. The models use those patterns to ‘parrot’ human-like language. And they quietly underpin services like Google Search—used by billions of people worldwide—and predictive text software, such as Grammarly,” writes Emerging Tech Brew’s Hayden Field.

Of course, if you’re a marketer, who cares? You just need content. And lots of it. That’s where these tools come in handy. They can help write everything from Instagram captions to product descriptions to blog posts.

“We want to humanize AI. We want to help you start from something, and not a blank slate,” Copysmith CEO Shegun Otulana told Marketing Brew.

There’s an assumption that machines could take jobs away from writers, but Otulana doesn’t see it quite that way. “There’s an aspect of writing that isn’t easily replaced. A computer can’t tap into the human interactions you express in a story, the emotional aspects of a story you tease out. A computer can’t live the life of a human.”

But if you’re a writer who specializes in, say, product descriptions for e-commerce sites—or other types of copy that aren’t exactly trying to forge a human connection—these tools might pose more of a threat, he said.

For copywriters who need to bang out posts on multiple platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, there’s a volume benefit to these tools, since the AI provides various options for each post. Sure, you might not actually need dozens of call-to-action phrases, but any professional could whittle those down to five good ones and tweak them if needed.

“We try to give you the first draft,” Chris Lu, cofounder and chief technology officer of Copy.ai, told us. “Content creation is a treadmill. You’ve got to make a lot of it, it has to be relevant, and it has to be on brand.”

Andrew Race, a strategist at the digital agency Juice, called Copy.ai a time saver. “In five minutes, I’ve got 25 different variations [of a headline]. Before, I would have had to write every single headline or idea out myself,” he said. He estimates it cuts his actual copywriting time in half.

So far Copy.ai, which debuted in October 2020, has 4,100 paying subscribers made up mostly of marketers.

Ryan’s artificial copy

We asked Copy.ai to make a couple of Facebook headlines and posts for a made-up brand called Ryan’s Lemonade, giving only the keywords “lemonade, sweet, tart, fresh.”

Here are three versions it came up with:

It’s So Good You’ll Want Seconds: With a history of providing quality fruit drinks, Ryan’s continues on with their new line of lemonades. From sweet and tart to a hint of fresh, Ryan’s is bound to quench any thirst.
Cool, Refreshing: Pure and natural lemonade sweetened only with real sugar, not high fructose corn syrup.
Nothing is as refreshing as Ryan’s: Have you ever felt like you were in paradise? Everyday life is a bit harder than we wish it to be. Lemon Ryan’s is the perfect amount of all things good, made by real people in the sun-drenched hills of California. $5 for a gallon? No… lets make that two!

As you can see, it isn’t perfect. But it’s pretty good, and each took less than 10 seconds. Copy.ai assumes a lot—we’re not sure where “$5” or “California” came from. “These are natural language models. All it’s trying to do is write text. It’s just trying to predict the next word,” Lu told us.

If only a few keywords are plugged in, the content produced by these tools can have a generic feel to it. Lu said he doesn’t expect plagiarism to be an issue, but did say the company is planning on adding a plagiarism detector. “The AI helps with how to say, not what to say,” he added.

Copywriter –> AI editor

Similar to Copy.ai, Jarvis also lists templates for platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, but its bread and butter is longer-form content, like a blog post.

According to Dave Rogenmoser, founder of Jarvis, it has nearly 30,000 paying subscribers. At least 60–70% of its clients, which include Airbnb, Zillow, and CVS, are using it for projects “around 500 words,” Rogenmoser told Marketing Brew.

By inputting a few key words, Jarvis can spit out entire paragraphs, turning your average copywriter into an editor, who can guide the machine in a specific direction. If it veers off and becomes illegible, a user has to delete what isn’t working and try again. It doesn’t eliminate work entirely, as someone still has to pick and choose what works.

This post by Danny Veiga, a digital marketer in San Antonio, was written by Jarvis. Veiga told Marketing Brew Jarvis did about 80% of the work. The other 20% was mostly fact checking.
Veiga uses Jarvis for his email marketing, social posts, and homepage copy.

“Jarvis thrives when you need to write a lot of words, but they don’t need to be the most important words you’ve ever written,” said Rogenmoser. In other words, AI probably won’t win a Pulitzer anytime soon, but if you’re cranking out copy, it’ll give you a template for a flood of usable jumping points.

“It takes the mental load off. Writers are safe,” said Rogenmoser. For now.

By Ryan Barwick

Sourced from Morning Brew

In News

What a Customer Relationship Platform Is and What It Can Do For Your Business

September 13, 2021 No Comments

By Scott Clark

CRM platforms have been around since the 90s, and have evolved over the last decade to include artificial intelligence, machine learning and improved functionality. That said, just what is a CRM platform, what is its primary purpose, and how is it used to increase sales and turn leads into customers? In this article we will answer those questions and tell you why the martech stack should include a full-featured, unified CRM platform.

What Are CRMs Used For?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms are most often used by sales, marketing professionals, and customer service staff to manage and refine a brand’s relationships and interactions with prospective leads and current customers. CRMs are able to manage the relationships that a brand has with its customers through the entire customer lifetime. While many brands are using Customer Data Platforms (CDP) to unify customer data across all channels, CRMs are still in use by the majority of enterprise businesses. A recent report from Stellaxius revealed that 91% of businesses with over 11 employees use a CRM.

As brands grow and become more sophisticated, their use of a CRM grows with them to take on more duties, said Tony Kavanagh, CMO at Insightly. “CRM has an increasingly broader remit which goes beyond sales to include marketing, service & support, field service, ecommerce and analytics,” he said. “Customer experience by definition relates to every interaction a customer has with your company from unknown website visitor to full happy customer for life. CRM should be looked upon as the technical backbone to help manage this entire journey,” he said.

Older CRMs had the problem of siloed customer data, which resulted in a highly fragmented view of customers, which negatively affects a brand’s ability to consistently engage customers in a timely manner. “The way to address this is to consider moving to a unified CRM platform so that all customers’ data sits in one secure place, and on which all the required CRM applications of sales, marketing and customer service & support. This will ensure that all customer-facing teams are looking at the exact same set of the most recent customer data, resulting in higher rates of responsiveness from both sales and customer service reps and higher customer satisfaction and retention rates,” suggested Kavanagh.

CRMs are also used to provide customer service professionals with instant access to each and every interaction that a customer has had with a brand, including chat history, purchase history, and customer service tickets. Access to this information allows customer service personnel to provide well informed, immediate responses that leave customers feeling satisfied.

The 3 Types of CRMs

There are three different types of CRMs: operational, analytical, and collaborative. Although all CRMs share some core functionality, the primary roles of each are different:

Operational CRMs: These streamline and automate sales, marketing, and service processes, and are used to generate leads and convert them into contacts, while at the same time capturing all details. They also help to provide service throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
Analytical CRMs: These are used for the analysis of customer data which has been collected from various touchpoints in the customer journey. They enable brands to make more informed decisions, enable marketers to evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns, sales professionals to increase sales, and customer service agents to improve the quality and efficiency of support.
Collaborative CRMs: These enable a brand to share its customer information between departments (sales, HR, marketing, IT, customer service, and others). They also enable all of a brand’s departments to share the same goal, which is to improve customer service, increase customer loyalty, and acquire new customers.

Sridhar Jayaraman, VP of Engineering at Qentelli, views a CRM as a “one stop platform” that is used to capture all of the conversation with or about a brand’s customers, including those that occur during and after the sales cycle. “Every professional involved in these conversations — including Lead Generation Specialists, Inside Sales and Field Sales reps, Sales Engineers, Account Managers, Customer Support reps — all capture the information in the CRM, so it becomes the single source of truth!” said Jayaraman.

CRM Core Functionality

Although the three types of CRMs have different uses, there are three functions that are common to all CRM platforms: contact management, interaction tracking, and lead management. Contact management is used to store customers’ contact information in a searchable database, including names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, and social media accounts. Interaction tracking is used to input notes and track customer interaction history, which is used to document conversations with specific customers. Lead management allows businesses to manage the process of converting prospects into leads (potential customers) by identifying, scoring, and moving them through the sales funnel.

Additional functionality that many CRMs provide may include:

Email marketing integration and templates
AI-based decisioning
Workflow automation
3rd party integration support
Reporting/dashboard and analytics
Sales forecasting
Live chat
Conversational AI chatbot
Call centre integration
Document management
Sales pipeline management
Mobile CRM functionality
Quote and proposal management
REST API support
Social media management

Additionally, some CRMs have the ability to send automated emails to customers, for example, after a specified number of days since the customer’s last purchase from a brand. This allows a business to remain in contact with a customer through personalized emails which deliver relevant content, coupons, offers, incentives, and seasonal promotions.

Customizable email templates can be triggered to be sent based on events, including purchases (“thank you for your order”), product inquiries (“you asked about this product”), shopping cart abandonment (“we noticed you left several items in your cart”), and customer service calls (“we hope we were able to solve your problem”) among others.

Other CRMs use AI and process automation to identify customer sentiment through analytics, and rapidly respond to customer service inquiries and social media posts.In fact there are some CRM platforms that are able to intercept problems and complaints on social media that could potentially threaten a brand’s reputation by using social listening. Businesses are able to respond instantly to customer complaints before they can cause damage to the businesses’ reputation.

Many brands use a CRM as a way to gain a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of specific marketing campaigns. “Marketing professionals use the CRM platform to create and track campaigns, gain insights into which campaigns are working and channel energies to drive many such campaigns. This will generate quality MQLs that can be sent to the Sales teams,” said Jayaraman. The CRM is also useful for contract management and forecasting. “As the sales process involves efforts from multiple resources, while identifying the probability of a particular opportunity, a CRM platform can offer visibility to the sales leadership with a monthly or quarterly review of best- and worst-case scenarios.”

Non-Traditional Uses of a CRM Platform

While a CRM is valuable for its traditional functionality, there are many non-traditional uses for a CRM. The cross-department transparency that a CRM provides ensures that every salesperson can see the interactions that each customer has had with the brand. This means that customers will not be overwhelmed with multiple sales calls, and department leads can easily see the effectiveness of their sales and marketing department. The CRM also makes it easier to determine which marketing channels are most effective.

Other uses include historical market and sales analysis, which enables brands to be able to anticipate the needs and spending habits of their customers, increase the efficiency of marketing campaigns, and identify and capitalize on trends.

Many brands use a CRM to keep their customers up to date as they go through the stages of the sales funnel, much like Amazon.com does. Once the customer places an order, they will receive an email letting them know that the order has been received. Once the order has been packaged and shipped, the customer receives another email that tells them their order is on the way, and typically includes a tracking number. When the order is delivered, the customer receives an email letting them know that their order has arrived. Finally, a follow-up email is sent asking the customer if they would be willing to write a review or provide feedback about their order. Also included in the follow-up email are offers for related products or services that the customer may be interested in, based on their personal shopping history with the brand. This is a great way to keep the customer engaged, emotionally satisfied, and loyal to the brand.

Final Thoughts

The Customer Relationship Management platform is an extremely useful tool for marketers, sales professionals, and customer service representatives. CRMs enable brands to manage and build stronger relationships with prospective leads and customers, enhance customer service, increase transparency between departments, and eliminate departmental data silos.

Feature Image Credit: Daniel Cheung

By Scott Clark

Sourced from CMS WiRE

In News

Google updates Search to generate and show ‘more readable’ page titles

September 13, 2021 No Comments

By Abner Li

Google’s latest Search improvement is a “new system of generating titles for web pages” that better describes what a result is about.

One of the primary ways people determine which search results might be relevant to their query is by reviewing the titles of listed web pages. That’s why Google Search works hard to provide the best titles for documents in our results…

Google wants the main part of a search result — in between the domain/URL and summary — to be “more readable and accessible.” Introduced last week, the company says testing has shown that this new system is “preferred by searchers.”

The previous approach saw page titles possibly change based on the search query entered by users. This new system produces “titles that work better for documents overall.” As such, different page names will “generally” no longer occur.

Google updates Search to generate and show 'more readable' page titles

Another aspect of this updated page title system sees Google place emphasis on text that “humans can visually see when they arrive at a web page.” Other page text and “text within links that point at pages” might also be factored.

We consider the main visual title or headline shown on a page, content that site owners often place within <H1> tags, within other header tags, or which is made large and prominent through the use of style treatments.

When Search encounters an “extremely long title,” Google will just use the “most relevant portion” and truncate the “more useful parts.” The company might also show site names alongside page titles when helpful.

For website owners, Google will soon release updated guidance:

However, our main advice on that page to site owners remains the same. Focus on creating great HTML title tags. Of all the ways we generate titles, content from HTML title tags is still by far the most likely used, more than 80% of the time.

By Abner Li

Sourced from 9 TO 5 Google